[Forbes] Houston Rockets among teams worth over $1 billion

3rd franchise with more revenues / operating income

 

Plenty of revenue to afford a top line head coach. #thibs

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Some other notes from Forbes list: Knicks had highest revenue at $307m, Lakers 2nd at $304m, Rockets 3rd at $237m, Bulls 4th at $228m</p>&mdash; Steve Kyler (@stevekylerNBA) <a href="https://twitter.com/stevekylerNBA/status/689864015024119808">January 20, 2016</a></blockquote>
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Some combination of:

-huge Asian fanbase (to this day, the only NBA jerseys I see in China more than Yao/McGrady are Kobe jerseys)
-playoff revenue (long playoff runs add to this)
-sellouts (those empty seats you always see on the lower levels are corporate and already sold, Rox were 3rd in the league last season in attendance by percentage of official building capacity, selling 101% of available seats)
-new TV deal (though I don't know the specifics behind this)
-large market (Houston, as of the end of 2014 had a larger metro area GDP than DFW despite having a smaller population and a significantly larger metro area GDP than Miami. Houston is a large market despite what the media would like folks to believe).

Probably some other factors in there too but the Rockets have long been strong from the revenue perspective.

 

We added lasers.